


Fallible Creatures

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Romance, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:12:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5274404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let the cynics and optimists debate love, he remembered Q saying once, apropos of—not Madeleine, it couldn’t have been Madeleine, that had come too late—some woman Bond had used as a lever against a fulcrum.  Let them debate it: the pragmatists would use it, and just as often get fucked over by it.</p><p>(Post-<i>Spectre</i>.  Bond returns to London, but it's been seven years, and nothing he's left behind has stayed still in his absence.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With many heartfelt thanks to FlyMeAway/charmedor/Or for help and encouragement.

The way it happened was Bond was sitting half-asleep in a piazza in Rome, the sun baking the stone until all the air smelled like bread in an oven, and in the slit of vision he allowed himself, a gap-year student who looked a bit like Q rode by on a cobalt blue bicycle. He was only coasting, his hands folded loosely about the handles, his feet in their cheap leather sandals still on the pedals and freckled at the tops.

Bond paid the check for his espresso and stood. The boy slid over the cobbled edge of the horizon. His hair was the wrong color: too light a brown. And of course he was too young. Q had been older than that even when they had first met, and it had been seven years since Bond had last seen him.

He felt at loose ends. He went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and then slicked off his sweat swimming laps in the pool, his face half-turning in clockwork-regular cycles out of the ultra-blue chlorinated water for gulps of air. His times were slower. Even after all this time, he had not lost the ability to count seconds and minutes in his head. He had learned that with le Chiffre and never really unlearned it. What he had also learned, eventually, was that when he started doing that, he was in some kind of trouble.

He dried his face.

Two hours after returning to the little two-room _appartamento_ , he had booked a one-way flight to London that would leave in a week’s time. He had very little to pack and spent the remainder of his days in retirement trying to determine when so much of his wardrobe had become rumpled white linen; he had to replace most it.

When he landed at Heathrow, it was a windy, rainy Wednesday afternoon, and the terminal had the seemingly ground-in odor of processed chocolate and cheap and powdery sticks of chewing gum. Going through Customs was slow. By the time he got out, the rain had slowed to a mere drizzle and Eve Moneypenny was waiting for him outside the doors. She had a large dark green umbrella in one hand and a stuffed Corgi with a British flag jumper on it in the other.

“I thought it would match your bulldog,” she said to him, to welcome him back to his life.

“Equally hideous, certainly.”

She held it out to him and he took it.

“I didn’t have a lot of lead-time past your application for re-entry to do shopping.”

“I knew you’d think of something. England never sleeps.”

“And me least of all.” She led him to a government car ostentatiously parked in the drop-off/pick-up loop, hazards blinking respectfully at them, and got into the back with him. “Headquarters, if you please, Tom.”

“A chauffeur now. All the ex-pat tax money I’ve sent home has been doing some good, then.” He stretched his legs out as best he could. “Or did they finally take your license? You always were hell behind the wheel.”

“As though you’re one to talk.”

They fell into silence: he felt he had already exhausted everything he knew of her, and he was struck by the realization that there had been a time when that had not been true. He couldn’t think how to make conversation. She was dressed nicely, and expensively, but she knew that.

“How did you know I’d be coming back?” He nodded at the shape of MI6 headquarters swelling up on the horizon—it was no landmark, merely a building like any other building, but he had walked by a thousand nearly identical to it in a dozen cities over the last seven years and never felt even a quiver of recognition. Not because he had not been thinking of it, but because it was too essential to him for him to ever mistake it.

“I didn’t,” Moneypenny said lightly, “I’m requisitioning you for report, for old times’ sake. Then I was thinking I’d stand you a drink. But it’s really the prodigal son returning?”

 _More like the dog to its vomit_. Bond ran his thumb along the condensation on the window instead of answering.

“That leaves a smudge,” Moneypenny observed, almost but not quite neutrally, and Bond turned to her and took another look at her wardrobe, taking in the watch, the camel-colored ankle boots, the sleek stockings. And the planes of her face, subtly broadened and reshaped by the extra time, which must have put her at, what, forty-two? Forty-three?

“If you’re the new M,” he said, “you really have better things to do than fetch me from the airport, with or without the driver.”

She laughed. “A valiant attempt, but you’re a few months shy of the truth. M won’t retire until after Christmas—he wants to round out the year—although he may move that up a tick when he sees you’re back home, let alone back and wanting a job. But yes, I’m next in line. He’s catching some heat for it, everyone says I’m too young, that it’s a political appointment. I think I’ll do.”

“So do I,” he said.

She registered his confidence as casually as if it were a stray raindrop, and he corrected himself in his head: she would more than do.

They were dropped off at the front of the building and Moneypenny got doors opened for as she strode toward them with Bond coming along in her wake, glancing sideways towards the wall to see if he knew any of the names that had been added to it. They went by too quickly for him to be sure. Though he had never had many friends.

“Is everyone still here?”

“I can’t remember the staff we had seven years ago down to the last tea-boy,” Moneypenny said as they entered the lift, “but most of the major players are accounted for. We lost 003 two years ago—a stupid fucking communications cock-up, of all things—and 001, 006, and 009 have all retired, though they settled for cottages in the country and actually bothered to file the correct paperwork for their pensions instead of sending it all as email attachments six months later from, if I remember correctly, an internet café in the Philippines. As for M, I’ve already told you. He’s got a bit gaunt; don’t ask him about his health.”

“Cancer?”

Her chin dipped just slightly. The perfect polish of her showed a sudden hard chip-and-flake around her mouth and eyes, and Bond understood the feeling of it, that immense impossible-to-untangle feeling that he had last had in a chapel in Scotland with the winter air biting into his ears and blood warming his hands. Let the cynics and optimists debate love, he remembered Q saying once, apropos of—not Madeleine, it couldn’t have been Madeleine, that had come too late—some woman Bond had used as a lever against a fulcrum. Let them debate it: the pragmatists would use it, and just as often get fucked over by it.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not happening to me.” The doors slid open and she resumed walking, the authoritative click her heels had had against the marble floors abruptly dampened and softened by the carpeting that had probably been torn up and moved to each successive top floor since the Cold War. “But thank you.”

Bond fell in alongside her.

“Décor hasn’t changed much,” he said after a pause.

“We still have a monarchy.” She nodded towards the stuffed Corgi in his hand. “You should know we’re not in the business of tossing the functional, even the ceremonial, so long as it still works.”

“Have you met her?”

“I have. I can’t say we talked much, but there it is. I got the shakes afterwards, believe it or not. Not to be crass, but I’m glad to have gotten it in before the inevitable occurred—I can’t say I would have been as keen on meeting Charles.” She stopped at an immense walnut desk outside of a closed door. “Did you ever get the chance?”

“They don’t introduce those of us on the ground. Alpha before numerical.” And in any case, Bond had had his Queen, and served her, and she had never been Elizabeth.

Moneypenny pressed a button on a taupe-colored machine on the desk and the light on it changed from red to green.

“Go on,” she said. “Have someone find me when you’re done and I’ll buy you that drink.”

Away she went, a ship stranding him at a port.

Bond reminded himself that he could leave anytime he liked. All he had was a single suitcase and he wouldn’t have minded leaving even it behind: he could take the bulldog in one hand and the Corgi in another, slip Vesper’s necklace in his jacket pocket, and go. He had not made any decisions; he hadn’t even been offered any decisions to make.

He went inside the office.

M did look gaunt, gaunt and gray-faced, Moneypenny had not been wrong about that, but Bond could almost catch a visceral whiff of cordite off him, that hot-metal feel someone got when they had flooded their body as though it were an engine and not flesh and bone; a sense he had gotten from himself, though not in some years. Nevertheless, M was quick, snappish even, because once he had registered who Bond was, he lowered the file he was looking at and said, “I hope you’re not expecting back-pay.”

“It’s good to see you too, M.”

“No reaction to the obvious death about me, so she must have briefed you on your way in.”

“It’s unfortunate.”

“I’d go so far as to call it a fucking waste of my golden years, but what can you do? Have a seat if you’re staying.”

Bond hesitated and then sat.

“I can see that was an immensely fraught moment for you,” M said dryly. “How was Italy?”

He was glad there was to be no pretense that they hadn’t known, every day, where he had been: he had always found the assumption of ignorance to be dull. They had left him alone when he had needed to be alone and that was all he had ever thought to ask for. “Sunny, warm, full of _panettoni_ at Christmastime. A disinclination to tear down heaps of crumbling stone.” He started to say that he had been happy there, but then realized that he had no idea one way or the other whether that was true.

“Returning to us or just returning home?”

“I don’t think of things in terms of ‘home’ any longer,” Bond admitted. “I’ve been gone too long.”

“You realize that might reasonably be considered a deficiency in a man working for his country.”

“It occurred to me.”

“I appreciate that you didn’t lie, at least. You realize you’re past age on being a field agent. I don’t mean to be blunt, but even if you’re fit, there’s wear and tear you simply don’t come back from past a certain point, and I don’t like sending people out once the elasticity’s gone out of them.”

Bond nodded, remembering the endless series of chin-ups and, for that matter, psychological screenings. “I wouldn’t qualify as it is.” He didn’t know if he would have come back if he had. There had been an exhaustion to the last year or so in Rome, to the endless and unchanging pattern of the sun on stone and the days without point or purpose, a weariness that suggested that absent an audience or a partner, he at least had no business playing at an endless holiday, but all the same, what he had missed had not been adrenaline but something more elusive and in all likelihood more dangerous. Company; utility. But not death.

“Give me a few days and I can offer you something in-house,” M said. “Don’t let the terror sink too deeply into your soul, 007. Bond. I’m not holding out a desk job, though the prospect of that would be comical enough. Do you have living arrangements?”

“Not yet.”

“Travel websites exist,” M said. “Don’t expect us to spend money on you until we have a signed contract—as it is, you’re a flight risk. But Q-branch has been working on a line of sofas—don’t touch your eyes directly to the fabric and you’ll be fine, as far as I’ve heard.”

Bond was intensely aware of his own stillness, like a Venus fly trap itching to close. “Q is still Q, I imagine?”

M nodded. “More constant than some, thankfully. We couldn’t afford to replace him.”

“Then I’ll stop by there next.”

But M had scrutinized too much surveillance footage over the years, and managed too many consummate liars, to not recognize that the conversation had shifted in some way. His eyes narrowed.

Bond tried to look innocent but lacked the necessary experience.

“You asking after people makes me nervous for them,” M said. “I’m remembering now why I always felt we should have treated you like the Manhattan Project and taken you out into the desert to explode you in a depopulated area. It’s been years, Bond. People’s lives have changed. Things haven’t stayed wherever you last left them.”

“I haven’t come back counting on anything,” Bond said steadily, “and I don’t know what it is you think I’d be counting on.”

“I have less time to listen to bollocks now than I did before. Do I really need to be specific?”

Bond understood what M saw when he looked at him—a carousel of images of women and men, blood and sweat, pricks and tits and come and pressure expertly applied to windpipes—and he understood how poorly that meshed with Q, Q the constant, undoubtedly still with his skinny wrists and his hair in disarray. But it did not stop him from smiling the almost reptilian smile he had not felt on his face in some time. M did not appear to be affected by it. Mr. White again, Bond thought, struck by the memory of it. There was so very little you could do to intimidate those who were already dying.

“No,” Bond said. “I think we understand each other.”

“I mean, it’s not that I really give a fuck about your extracurriculars. But I don’t like broken things, and it’s my plan to end this year out with a feeling of closure.”

Bond stood, and held out his hand. There was an almost burnt edge to something inside him when he looked at M and he couldn’t keep hold of his resentment. He had never ruled Bond the way she had ruled him, but Bond felt his lack of attendance just then. As though he could have prevented cancer, of all the stupid things.

 _Take it from someone who knows_ , he almost said. _Closure is an illusion. There’s a time when you’re ready to leave, and it’s immediately followed by a hundred times you want to return. Never trust a double-agent, and the mind is the worst one there is._

But M would not have that kind of time. Bond knew death more intimately than he knew anything else, and he was certain of that, in all likelihood even more so than M’s physicians.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to find me when something comes up,” he said.

*

Once out, Bond plucked up a staffer like a single rose from a bouquet and asked her to let Moneypenny know, at her convenience, that he had gone to Q branch.

“Right,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, but I suppose that’s not essential to the message.”

He made a note to tell Q that there had been a marked uptick in sass since he had left, and to ask if that was Q’s influence or not. He felt his stride lengthen.

Out into the air that still had that bite of fallen rain and around the corner. He heard the faint _zip_ as his shoes sped forward through puddles. He did not take time to turn up his collar against the chill and so there were stray drops of rapidly condensing mist clinging to the nape of his neck as he came out of the tunnel into Q branch. The stones had sweat on them, too. He felt he was in good company.

They had laid in more lighting, but otherwise, it was the same. He would have noticed even a scratch on a single stone.

The heart of the place had always been reserved for Q alone. Bond was there, as direct as a dagger, and there, sitting at a desk with something in several pieces in front of him and a pair of tweezers in one hand, was Q.

He’d cut his hair. It was quite short.

Bond didn’t like it.

“Hello, Q,” he said, and Q looked up and then needed to push his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

“Oh,” Q said. His expression was densely unreadable: a wall of text in some foreign language. “It’s you.” As though he were picking up something off the floor, a paperclip or a phone bill, something he had forgotten and was mildly relieved to find again, though he could have gone on well enough without it. “You don’t have to stay in the doorway. That must be something they teach all of you—the lurking of it all.”

Bond went to meet him. Up close, Q looked a little whiter than usual, a little more drawn. ( _Usual_ , he scolded himself, _what’s usual when you last saw him almost a decade ago_.) Time had taken away his spots and given him fine lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth; laugh-lines, so-called. Bond was relieved to see them. For a moment, seeing Q’s face, he had worried.

“I lost track of you after a bit,” Q said. “Where did you end up spending your time? And hand me that, that over there. The other one. Yes, thanks.”

“I washed up in Rome.”

“Where others work their lives to visit, James Bond only ‘washes up.’” His mouth turned up briefly. “I’ve been. I wanted to drop acid in the Coliseum, but was frightened out of it at the last moment. Certain brains are too valuable to be subjected to chemicals. And Dr. Swann?”

“Fine as far as I know. She sends me postcards.”

“Ah.” Q caught hold of the chip he was looking for and lifted it out, placing it delicately on a spread-out handkerchief. “How long ago?”

“Five years or so.”

“And you gone seven. I suppose that settles a long-standing pool we’d all had about what made you walk, the lady or the gun.” He put the tweezers down and made actual eye contact. He looked, Bond decided, good but tired. It was then that he noticed the wedding ring.

The Q in the piazza had not been his Q, but he did not know this Q either. He and M had been having a stranger conversation than he had thought.

Bond looked at the ring, and his voice was calm as he said, “It seems you’ve had better luck.”

Q looked down and opened and closed his left hand. “Ah,” he said, his voice a little higher than before, “yes. I had very good luck.”

“Congratulations.” He was able to smile, and he supposed he was even able to do it convincingly. “I’d have sent a gift if you’d invited me.”

“You’d have given me socks. I know perfectly well you had me for Secret Santa the year you left and halfway through December I got a squashed package from Buenos Aires: inside, a pack of biscuits reduced to crumbs and a pair of purple argyle socks.”

“In my defense, I didn’t know they’d be down to crumbs by the time they reached you.”

“But you did know the socks would stay socks. After all I’d given _you_.”

They had rocked into their old rhythm again as easily as a train settled into its track. Bond forgot the wedding ring and all its implications of change: this was all as comfortably well-trod and familiar as the carpeting in M’s office. 

“Well, I am back,” Bond pointed out, “maybe I’ll draw your name again this year and get you something you’d like better.”

But something in Q’s face had changed. He looked more like what Bond remembered of M—his M—than he did himself. Spectacularly unimpressed, if he had to put a name to it.

“Oh, you’re _back_ ,” Q said. “I thought you were only dropping in. Sort of a hello, remember me, I almost cost you your job once, would you like to grab a drink and catch up?”

“Have a drink with me then,” Bond said, not sure what the problem was. “Come along with me and Moneypenny. Complain about my past if you like.”

“Only you would appear like a magician’s trick at the end of however many years and just expect people to fall—oh, go away, 007. I’m busy.” But his hands were only twisting the edge of the metal countertop as if he hoped to wrench it off. His knuckles were white.

Bond said, “I don’t remember you being this unreasonable.”

“I’m surprised you remember me at all.” He took up the microchip in his tweezers again and squinted at it, his eyes screwed up so tightly they were almost closed.

Bond stood patiently, at a kind of relaxed attention, until Q lowered his hand. His lips flexed at Bond in what could have been generously interpreted as a pathetic kind of smile. He twisted the wedding band around and around his finger.

“He died,” Q said. He chopped up the sentences like salad. “My partner. Nick. A year and a half ago. I can’t seem to take it off. It used to only come off with soap and water, but it slips more now, but I just can’t seem to—to actually do it.”

Bond’s first recourse with death was always to consider methodology. “How—”

“Aneurysm.”

He had made a ladder out of bones to climb out of what he had felt after Vesper was gone. If he had had nothing to hate, he didn’t know if he would still be alive. “I’m sorry.”

Q made a short chuffing sound, a laugh that wasn’t quite. “Thank you. Go and have your drink with Moneypenny.”

"Come with us."

“You only want me to join you so you can stop carrying that around,” Q said, nodding at the Corgi Bond was still holding. “And I don’t think I want to, not tonight. I’ll be seeing you around and about, I suppose, and we’ll see about doing all this catching up some other time.”

Bond wanted to give him something, but he didn’t know what he had to offer. He wanted, he supposed, to tell Q something about how bright the sun had been in the piazza the day he had decided to come back to London; that his eyes had been dazzled by it when he thought he’d seen Q glide by on the bicycle. And the shock of the water when he had dove in to swim after Vesper. Neither of those things seemed helpful even to him. It occurred to him that he had left his life rather late—that the train couldn’t be put back on the tracks, after all. If Q had been a woman, he would have known better what to do. Or not. He supposed Moneypenny would quibble with that.

Bond didn’t ask after the Q branch dormitories, after all. He would find some place somewhere.

“Some other time,” he said.


	2. Chapter 2

Moneypenny still had a field agent’s taste in liquor and where to drink it.

“I like that mood of the whole place spoiling for a fight,” she said. “At minimum, a spot of property damage. And I’ll soon be too visible and important to get to enjoy things like this.” She was visible enough as it was, in her sleeveless ivory sheath of a dress, with the light glinting off her gold bangles and her constantly tilted-back glass. “It’s a nasty kind of pleasure. So what is M going to do with you?”

“No word yet. Not a desk job.”

“I can imagine you at that,” she said. “You’d chew your own leg off to get away.”

“I like the feeling of accomplishment.”

“Yes,” she said, “because certainly the rest of us don’t do shit all but look at porn on our desktops all day long.”

“And ‘I stayed gone long enough for someone who liked having work’ would’ve been sufficient enough as a retort, too.”

“That’s good.” She motioned for one more drink for each of them. “What did you do while you were gone? I’m imagining mostly sex in exotic places.”

“Mostly just in the usual places, but I’m open to suggestions.”

“Don’t divert. I _have_ thought about you from time to time over the years, on the days when they give me the wrong takeaway order and the water heater goes on the blink, and someone’s on the news for the third time that year saying our budget should be slashed or we’re nothing but thieves and murderers in decent suits. I’d take a bath, or a drink, and think, _Bond wouldn’t put up with any of this_ , and I’d imagine you on a beach somewhere.”

“There were beaches. Once, I thought seriously about getting a tattoo.”

“You’re an immense disappointment to me.”

“Would you like me better if I’d gotten it?”

“I suppose that depends on what it would have been.”

“I hadn’t gotten to that bit yet.”

“Where, then.”

“Left shoulder.”

“Boring,” she said. “Dull beyond description. What happened with Dr. Swann?”

“Nothing too exciting. We moved around at first—she found it hard to relax anywhere for quite a while—and if we’d kept doing that, it might have worked. It’s easier to be a different person in a different place. But we settled down in Amsterdam and then it all only took a few months to unwind. It wasn’t dramatic. She said we’d had illusions about each other, and neither of us was too interested in learning the truth. She still writes a bit from time to time.”

The dullness of that seemed to bore her, too.

“What happened with your friend?”

She looked perplexed.

“I called one night and you had a friend over.”

“What happened to someone I saw briefly _seven years ago_. I don’t know, Bond. Nice things, I expect.”

“Q got married,” Bond said.

“Leave it to you to suss out everyone’s sexual histories in an hour flat.” She spun one finger around the rim of her glass. “I hope you didn’t say anything too awkward to him about it.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it went well.”

“Dammit. It’s been hard enough for him without you making things worse. If I’d known you were going to stop by, I’d have warned you off it.”

“What happened?”

“Brain bleed, as far as I know. Awful, no warning at all.”

“No, with him getting married.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you. He met someone, they liked each other, they got married. That was, what, about eight months after your disappearing act, plus two years of dating. That’s how those things usually work. Nick Hawthorne. He taught art. I could probably still tell you more about him than you’d want to know, given how thoroughly we had to vet him when it was clear he and Q were going to be an item.” She took another drink. “I tell you, that’s a headache I’m not looking forward to if I ever settle down. Knowing someone else knows more about him than I do, lying down beside him every night knowing I can’t say a tenth of what I think and feel.”

“M was married,” Bond said.

She nodded. “Both of them. But you only meant the one, didn’t you? I think you forget Mallory exists.”

“It’s not convenient,” he admitted, “knowing her by that name, and someone else gets called by it.”

She looked at him over the rim of her glass. “You know, it took us a while before we named a new 007. Two years at least.”

“But there is one.”

“There is.”

“Q called me that, though,” Bond said.

“I wouldn’t read too much into that,” Moneypenny said. “007 is to Q as M is to Bond.” She looked quite pleased with herself at having gotten her analogy the right way around. She stood up and wobbled just a little as she found her feet—the only sign of tipsiness he had seen from her—but she found her wallet without trouble and paid for their drinks over his protests. “As M is to Bond,” she said again, more softly this time, and she touched his cheek. “We’re all such fallible creatures.”

*

Bond took the days M gave him to learn London again. Prêts, furled black umbrellas, the chatter of people speaking English all at once that made his head ache until he relearned, forcibly, how not to hear what people were saying even though he could understand it. He was staying in a hotel with scraped patches on the walls, a place where the laminated guidelines that had come with the room specified no hot plates and yet a hot plate had been there when he’d arrived. He didn’t know why he was staying there. Moneypenny had corrupted him.

M had a definite opinion about it when he knocked on his door on Bond’s fourth day back. “This place is a hellhole. Don’t self-flagellate just because we gave your number to someone else, it wasn’t like you were using it.”

“You talked to Moneypenny.”

“It’s difficult to do our jobs if we stitch our mouths shut. The notice says ‘no hot plates.’”

“It came with the room.”

“That strikes me as inconsistent.” M surveyed it all with marked distaste. “This isn’t a cry for help, is it?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Good, then you won’t object that I already checked you out downstairs.” M sat down on the edge of Bond’s bed. “Would you be agreeable to taking on some training master duties? Currently, we have one person managing a class of nine, and it’s becoming untenable. I’d like another set of hands, especially if we do more recruiting.”

“I don’t remember my class being the large.”

“It wouldn’t have been, it’s the changes to the double-oh program. Two shots fired under command and they’re shuttled off into civil service and an early pension, if they’d like one. I know,” he said, off Bond’s look, “it used to be it was cold blood that got you in, not out. But what was that doing for us? You were her best and brightest and even you weren’t cut out for it. Unflinching assassination is more than I like asking from people—the least we could do is only ask it twice. There haven’t been noticeable consequences to national security. It just means we have to rotate agents out more frequently.”

“By the time they get any good at their jobs, they’ll have finished them.”

“Their jobs are more than correct use of a sniper’s rifle. Or, in your case, I believe, a desperate scramble in a toilet. Sometimes they get mixed up in action that wasn’t intended, and we haven’t been counting that, though Eve’s weighing whether or not we should. That’ll fall on her shoulders to determine. Either way, it’s the new world. Now is the time you tell me you think I’m soft.”

“No,” Bond said. He felt like the last speaker of some archaic language. “Not that.”

“Then you’ll take the position.”

“I will.”

“Good. Prove yourself first with a class of one. You start tomorrow.”

“I can’t come in today?”

“No, you’re going to spend the remainder of today finding proper accomodations.” He handed Bond an envelope. “This should convince anyone you can afford the rent.”

Bond found a flat he could move into on the first of October. It had high ceilings with small cracks in them and the faucets seemed temperamental. That didn’t bother him. He was starting to prefer shabby elegance to actual luxury.

*

Addy Glaspell was twenty-two, with a short Afro and ropy muscles, and the first thing Bond wanted to tell her was that she had arrived early by a few years at least: she was still as downy as a newborn chick and though she’d beaten the rest of her body into near-metallic hardness, her face still showed traces of baby fat.

“You’ve done marksmanship, hand-to-hand, and interrogation resistance so far,” Bond said. “What are you best at?”

“It’s not in my file?”

“That’s what someone else thought you were best at.”

She nodded. “Marksmanship, sir.”

Bond could have overruled the sir but didn’t. He’d been trained by hand by M herself, and she had despised those kinds of informalities: “It does no good to pretend there’s not a hierarchy. If you don’t call me ma’am, I still have authority over where you go and what you do and who you kill. Either reduce it all to equality or get the hell out of the matter, but don’t fawn and pretend.”

“Worst at?”

“Interrogation resistance.”

“You don’t like pain.”

“I do. I’m just more of a giver than a receiver, sir.”

“I’m going to want to have you do all that again,” he said instead. “I can’t judge off files.”

They went onto the mats and circled each other. He was out of practice, and thirty years her senior, but within an hour her breathing was ragged and her gym shirt was almost translucent with sweat. When he called it off, she spritzed water into her mouth and paced, and he evaluated that the same way he’d evaluated her fighting. She was angry with herself but not sullen. Remembering to rehydrate was good. He’d made very little contact with her—he’d have to see, eventually, how she’d take a direct hit—and so her soreness was exhaustion and tension, not bruising. That could be worked through.

He had her run, swim, climb the standing wall. He kept pace with her for the running but only watched the rest—she had good technique in the water but she attacked it a little too hard, and her fury made the water choppy and slowed her down, but the climb was graceful and quick, a real beauty to behold. All in all, he dubbed her in better shape than he’d been when he started. He’d been a hammer and she was a knife.

He held her late that first night, mostly to see how she would react to the unreasonableness of it. She was quiet. He called end of session around ten o’clock and said, “You’ll sleep like a rock tonight, I’m guessing.”

She settled a towel against the back of her neck and wrung it at the ends, pulling it tight. She seemed to be debating something.

Then she said, “It’s an honor to work with you, sir.”

He could have laughed at the gravity of it all: she was so intense about it, and all from one thorough beating-down of her body, when the whole program was designed to make her into so much ground meat before she could be reassembled. He kept the lines of his face straight and rigid only with some effort.

“Wait and see how things go before you tell someone something like that,” he said instead. “Most of the people who’ve been pleased to meet me are dead now.”

*

October had turned into November by the time Bond saw Q again, and that time, Q came to him. Bond was working with Glaspell on marksmanship and felt like he was trying to teach a dance he’d only seen a footwork-pattern for, because the new double-oh training Tanner had briefed him on prioritized non-lethal shots, and Bond didn’t remember ever having deliberately taken one before. Then suddenly Q was there and he was saying, “You’re going about this all wrong, you know. I’d say just have her use rubber bullets.”

“Rubber bullets have a nasty history,” Glaspell said.

“So do real ones. At least rubber’s history is shorter. And it would relieve you of the knowledge that if you don’t shoot perfectly, your man—or woman—won’t go down.”

“He has a point,” Bond said, “but I’ll teach you either way.”

“Work smarter, not harder,” Q said. “Why make trouble?”

“Because she _could_ learn to shoot perfectly.” He saw Glaspell lose concentration on the target just then, her smile crinkling up her eyes at the edges. “And she’ll need to know how, no matter what she’s shooting. She might as well be comfortable with her ammunition, too.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, you can stop. You’ll eventually have to learn to shoot around noise, though.”

“Oh, the places you’ll go,” Q said, rolling his eyes. “Dr. Seuss never counted on you lot.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Q, by the way. Your Mr. Bond and I used to have thrilling adventures together.”

“Really?” Glaspell sounded almost star-struck.

“Well, no, not quite. But he was responsible for most of the excitement in my life for quite a while. Regrettably.”

“You can go on and take lunch,” Bond said.

She did, looking back over her shoulder at Q the whole way.

Bond started cleaning his gun. “You’ve gotten famous while I’ve been gone. She wasn’t even that impressed to meet _me_.”

“People with initials for names are always alluring. If they’re not allowed to know who we are, they think we must be dreadfully important. I meant to apologize for what happened when I saw you the other day. I was brusque.”

“The other day meaning a month ago.”

“You’re very particular about time for someone who was gone for seven years.”

“No apologies necessary, Q, especially not when you do them this badly.”

Q laughed but then fell silent, and the quiet curdled into awkwardness as Bond worked. He was down to polishing when he said, “How did the two of you meet?”

Q didn’t need to ask who he meant. “At the National Gallery,” he said, and Bond felt an unwelcome frisson of possessiveness, as if he’d owned the whole place, from first to last painting and every marble bench in between, all because he had sat there with Q once and looked at an oil he didn’t even remember the name of. “He was taking a group of pensioners through. The way he spoke about the paintings, I could tell he really knew something, but he also felt things, and he wasn’t afraid to blow them off if he didn’t like them. I offered to buy him a coffee and change his mind about Turner. If he could get away from his parents, that was, and he said, ‘You think all these lot are my parents?’, and I said I didn’t want to assume he hadn’t been raised by an orgiastic commune. There was that moment. When someone goes from seeing you to noticing you.”

He’d assumed people always noticed Q. “That’s nice.”

“You’re hopeless at commiserating with people. Do you want to have lunch too?”

He did. They went to a little French bistro a few blocks west, where Q talked animatedly about nothing in particular. He’d ordered a salad and a _crêpe beurre-sucre_ and gestured so much that he ended up powdering his wrists with icing sugar from his dessert. There were high spots of color in his face from how hard he was trying to have a good time, and Bond wanted to kiss him, but it wasn’t really that kind of place, and it wasn’t really that kind of time. He leaned forward instead, and listened.


	3. Chapter 3

Moneypenny wanted regular reports on Glaspell and didn’t give a damn that Bond disliked giving them.

“It makes me feel like an informant.”

“Well,” she said, crossing her legs neatly at the ankle, “we _are_ in the business of information.”

“I never did much with that. I was more the blood and money type.”

“And now you’re the teaching type, training the next generation to leave behind a legacy that’s about knowledge and keeping some bloody sort of peace, and I want to know how it’s going. You act like I’m trying to get rid of her.”

Because it was naïve, Bond wanted to say, to believe that she never would. She and M could play nice all they wanted, but the service chewed up its boys and girls, and finished either by spitting them out or swallowing them down. He had a chain of them as examples—Silva given up by his M who had ended her days on trial for her own job, a trial presided over by Mallory, who was now eaten up with weariness and riddled with cancer, his pick for a successor a bone of contention everyone wanted a moment to gnaw on.

It was nothing personal. Moneypenny and M had his loyalty, his respect, and even what he could offer of affection. But he could not relax enough with them to hold out this girl to be the bird in their hand against whatever lurked in the bush.

Nevertheless, he had to say something, or the meetings would have gotten awkward. He weighed each piece of information before giving it away.

“She came within a minute and a half of winning hand-to-hand yesterday.”

Moneypenny raised her eyebrows. “A minute and a half?”

“I could feel it coming and called it off.”

“You saw that milestone on the horizon and just decided today didn’t feel like the day for your student to make a significant breakthrough?”

“It may have been a little childish of me.”

“Oh? _Mightn’t_ it have been?” She made a small mark on her tablet. “Did she have any notable achievements you didn’t run away from in fear?”

“Perfect marksmanship score last week. Repeated it three times.”

“Q’s rubber bullets?”

He shook his head. “The real kind. Perfect headshot, left shoulder, right shoulder, central mass, left knee, right knee. Does Q always pass on the unwanted suggestions he gives about my trainee?”

“Touchy, touchy. And technically the only suggestions of his I know _are_ the ones he’s passed on, so I’m not qualified to answer the question.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.”

“Over lunch?” Moneypenny said.

“Now who’s being childish?”

“All right,” she said evenly. “And the rest of Glaspell’s progress?”

“Good,” he said. “I’d go so far as to say good-to-excellent. She’s got steady hands, stamina, and a clear head. Workable ethics—remains to be seen if she’s bloodthirsty or just posturing, tough or just convincing, but any of those things can be useful. Of course, that’s all still just in the bits of her training I’ve done a second time.”

“Her interrogation resistance?”

Bond hesitated a fraction of a second too long—this was the part he had intended to obscure—and Moneypenny was too sharp not to spot it. He was out of practice, and she’d had too much of it.

“You still haven’t done it, have you? Bond, she’s not a little girl and she’s not made of glass. You went through it, I went through it, and, if you’ll recall, she went through it. Six out of ten. Passable, but not enough for the kind of work someone with her other scores should be doing. Do you think you’re doing her a favor by not training her? She won’t thank you if she’s ever strapped to a chair somewhere.”

“I _know_ that,” he said, and for a moment he could feel the give of wicker underneath him and see le Chiffre, whom he’d never forgotten. “It’s different with a woman.”

“How gentle and chivalrous of you, to bungle your job just so a promising trainee can get less prestigious assignments and less information about herself and the world and one day maybe even suffer pain she’s not prepared for and spill governmental secrets. If the old M had been like you, I’d never be where I am now. And God forbid whoever trained _her_ had been—”

“I know all that,” Bond said, his voice low. It would have been a mistake to read her still-crossed ankles and still-steady tone as signs that all was well. She was furious at him. Justifiably so. He knew he was cocking it up. “I’ll get it done, and properly. She’ll make a nine. Q can get you footage if you don’t trust my ratings.”

“Good,” she said, not saying whether she would or wouldn’t use it. Bond understood that. Even if she did trust him, she wouldn’t have wanted to say it right then. “Dismissed.”

*

He took his resentment out to dinner that night with Q and all night long it felt obvious and cumbersome, like having brought along his own silverware. As though their conversations didn’t have enough stilted moments already.

Since Q had stolen him away on the afternoon of the rubber bullets, they had had a handful of awkward, forced lunches and dinners, each one studded with patches of black ice. “We can be friends, can’t we?” Q had said unprompted at the end of that first lunch, and something about the hard glitter of his eyes, the strange ferocity of the question, had made Bond assent. But they had never been friends—they had shared space, secrets, plans, fears, and risks, but they hadn’t shared _time_. They’d had too little of it for that. He hadn’t minded—the job had always made that into an impossibility—because Q had been a fixed point, a landmark always on his horizon, recognizable and intimate.

A star to sail by, if he wanted to be that grand, that poetic, that hopeless. But he had left and Q had stayed, and Q had changed and he had not, and there were restaurants he couldn’t mention without plunging Q into a funk because they had been Nick’s restaurants. There was whatever Q was holding against him. There was whatever he felt for Q.

It was hard to have all that and a meal too, and on the night before his next session with Glaspell, Bond felt the weight of it and couldn’t shrug it off, even with half-a-lifetime of smooth pretense.

Though he tried. He was halfway through telling Q a story about a winter he’d spent in Beijing when Q, fooled by none of it—possibly least of all the story, which wasn’t even Bond’s but cribbed from a travel book, because he’d been that incapable of thinking of anything to say—interrupted him.

“Is something bothering you?”

“I’m fine.”

“No,” Q said, “you’re not.”

He got them each another glass of wine. There was an ease to Q in restaurants—something about him was like a hummingbird feeder that made servers bob in and out of attention to him with frenetic but glorious attention. He made Bond drink the wine down like it was medicine, and the unfussy, businesslike attention of it—“Go on, it’ll relax you”—reminded Bond of their old days together. It relaxed him at the same time as it made him feel strangely lonely.

“I’ve got to take her through interrogation resistance again tomorrow,” Bond said. “She needs to score a nine. I’ve been putting it off.”

“Ah,” Q said. He pushed his wine glass away from him. “You scored a nine, as I recall.”

It wasn’t the first time Q had indicated that he’d committed most of Bond’s file to memory. “Do you know what it means?”

“No. I’ve always tried not to think about it.”

“It’s more art than science. It’s no good thoroughly traumatizing them before the paint’s even dry, after all, but there’s a number of things you’re allowed to do, within reason. They don’t really break, of course, not properly, because they know it’s a construct. You just assess when you think they _would_ , given what you’re allowed to work with.”

Q touched a finger to the stem of his glass. “I wonder why I never went through it. I see as much as you’ve ever seen. More, probably. What score would I—”

Bond closed his eyes. He didn’t like what he found behind them. _Don’t make me think of that_ , he wanted to say, but he’d already thought it. It was like a reflex, no different from kicking out his foot at a hard tap on his knee. He knew exactly what he would do to break Q. Hands first, then eyes, and head as a last resort—the final crack of the nut. Put Q in a chair designed to separate him from his ability to string together words and numbers and one could have everything for the asking.

“Low, I’m thinking, from your face.”

“It would depend on what you had to hold out for.”

“Well,” Q said. “Everyone has something they don’t want to give up.” He took a long drink. The movement of his Adam’s apple was beautiful, and Bond thought, _Here’s a distraction to fall into, if nothing else_ , but then Q said, “Do you give her something she’s not supposed to tell you?” and ruined the moment.

“A word.”

“What word?”

*

“Clove,” he said to Glaspell. “Your word is clove.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s a spice.”

She allowed herself a flicker of irritation. “I know that, but why am I protecting it?”

“You’re protecting it because I told you to. Because M told you to, if that sweetens the pot enough. You won’t always have good reasons for things.”

In a sane system, he wanted to tell her, she would be allowed to weigh the value of her body against whatever cryptic tidbits were in her head, but their world wasn’t sane. Where other people had reason, they had rules. That was the lesson she was going to learn today.

Sometime later, he would have to tell her that there was another side to it. Where other people had empathy, they had loyalty. Q, M, Moneypenny: they had no more reason to take him in than Glaspell had to keep her word behind her lips. But they had. And if Glaspell ever needed it, they would do the same for her. He would do the same for her.

He was about to hurt her very badly.

“Do you understand that your word is clove? If you say it, I’ll stop.”

“A safe word.”

“It’s best not think of it that way,” Bond said. He felt a hard quirk in his lips, more an involuntary muscle spasm than a smile. “It’s only safe for you. It’s very dangerous for everyone else. Thinking of it as a safe word makes it into a lovely game you can call quits to whenever you’d like. This isn’t a game. Or if it is, it goes on long after you stop playing, and they make your corpse into a pawn. And that’s if you’re lucky.”

That time he didn’t ask her if she understood. He took her by the throat.


	4. Chapter 4

Afterwards, he turned up at Q’s and Q let him in.

“I’ve been keeping a kettle on for you. I had a feeling you’d need it. Rather, I had the feeling you’d come to me if you needed that, and if you needed Scotch you’d only crawl into a hole somewhere, or else go to Moneypenny.” He poured for Bond, and added cream and sugar. He did it all without a note on how Bond’s knuckles were bruised and his fingers were twitching—or shaking, if he was going to be honest with himself.

Q sat down beside him and drank his own tea, occasionally blowing on it in an undignified way and letting the steam cloud up his glasses. After a moment, he said, “What did she score?”

“Nine,” Bond said. His voice was hoarse. He’d been screaming at her toward the end, because the best interrogators always ended with that. It was at the end that it made the most difference, when every word abraded.

Q nodded. “At least you didn’t have to push her to ten.”

“There is no ten. You can’t rate someone perfect at withstanding interrogation.”

“Because you could never be sure?”

“Because no one could ever do it.” He gulped the tea down. They must have been sitting there together for longer than he’d thought between when Q had poured it for him and when Q had asked about Addy’s score, because it had gone cold. “The only scores are zero—no chance of withstanding questioning, absolutely not recommended for field work—through nine.”

“What does it say about us that we’re comfortable rating them a zero but not rating them a ten?” Q mused, his chin in his hand. “I’d suggest devising a better system.”

“I kept pushing her,” Bond said, “until she made it. I could have broken up the sessions, scored her a six and moved on, redone it in a month and scored her a seven, done it that way.”

“Yes, because _repeated_ torture sessions are so much less traumatic.”

“She knew I had expectations of her.” The chuckle seemed to burn his own lips: he spat it out like it was a coal. “No, she assumed I had low expectations of her, because we hadn’t done it. She thought I thought she would fail, so she had to succeed. She’ll never want to see me again.”

“You’d be surprised,” Q said, “the number of people who want to see you again.”

As if to prove his point, Bond’s phone buzzed. He looked at it. Moneypenny. Q waved him on to answer it and went to the cupboards to rummage; he started laying out biscuit packets and tins along the countertop like he was setting up a buffet. Bond felt his hands start to ache a little less, looking at it.

“I’ve done it,” he said, instead of “hello.”

“I know. I saw the footage. And I saw her.”

“I told her to go to medical.”

“She wanted my permission to eschew medical and fix herself up instead.”

“I damn well hope you told her no.”

“I did,” Moneypenny said evenly, “though in practical terms, there’s no reason she couldn’t have done it. You know the damage is always more minimal than it looks.” She sighed, and he heard the sound of one of her shoes toppling to the floor: he could picture her stretching out at her desk, massaging one stockinged foot. “And more severe, too. There’s no way of telling. I said that so you wouldn’t have to trouble yourself with a rebuttal. I don’t dispute your rating for her, for what that’s worth, and M’s standing you both down for a week.”

“Good. You’ll have time to reassign her.”

“You don’t get to request reassignment,” she said sharply.

“I’m not, but she will.”

“She hasn’t. I won’t say it’s never happened before, but—I don’t think she will. Listen, are you going to be done soon at Q’s or are you setting up camp there for a bit?”

He covered the phone with his hand. “Does she track where you are when she talks to you, or is that just for me?”

“She usually knows where I am,” Q said. “You’re the one who makes a hobby of disappearing. If she’s coming over, tell her I expect a better class of liquor than what she brought the last time.”

“Q says no cheap booze this time,” Bond said.

“Tell him beggars can’t be choosers and I’ll be over in ten.” She clicked off.

Q opened a crinkly package of biscuits and ate a chocolate-covered one. “She’s come over after each and every one of these bloody things for the last three years, for what it’s worth. It isn’t that yours was especially bad, it’s just tradition now. She comes over and gets pissed. She never talks about them, though,” he added. “It—meant something, that you did.”

“It means she’s more professional.”

“By a long shot,” Q said. “But that’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Yes.”

“I was never able to tell Nick what I do for a living. He thought I was a software designer, that I specialized in designing financial management programs—it’s so dull-sounding no one would ever want to know more than that. And then Eve kept showing up.”

“And she looked like no software designer he’d ever seen.”

Q blinked. “What? No. That doesn’t even make any sense. Software designers can look like anything, she’d make a perfectly acceptable one, aside from her limited tolerance for boredom.”

“Sorry.”

“Do _I_ look like a software designer?”

Bond surveyed him. “A bit, yes.”

“I need to learn never to try to open up to you,” Q said, but there was a look about his mouth as if he wanted to smile. “Yet, for futility’s sake, here I go again. He couldn’t understand what it was about financial management software that necessitated so much late-night drinking, which I said indicated a very limited understanding of financial-management software. For a bit, that worked just fine. I didn’t want to tell her to stop coming around—there are very few people we can talk to. Maybe you never needed that, but the rest of us are only human. But eventually he stopped believing me, and one night she came over and he left. Only for two nights. He stayed with a friend.”

“He thought you were having an affair.”

“And a strangely careless one. It took everything I had to convince him I wasn’t. That was a month before he died, and we spent a week of it on the outs. And then, after the wake, she came over, and I threw something at her. I don’t even know what it was. I think I remember it being vaguely fish-shaped, but I was very, very drunk.” He looked at his wedding band. “There doesn’t seem to be any consensus about when to remove it. Not tonight, I think. I want the illusion of having the three of you all in one spot, somehow with no complications.”

He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Q had always been Bond’s complication. That wasn’t likely to change in one night.

Bond selected a few shortbread biscuits and sat eating them in silence. They crumbled on his fingertips.

“Toss those in the tea if you like,” Q said. “ _In Search of Lost Time_ for a Scotsman.”

“They used to translate it as _Remembrance of Things Past_.”

“I read it in French,” Q said, in the unselfconscious way he sometimes said things that were followed by “when I was eleven” or “it’s not very interesting to a layman.” He still had his glasses off and Bond could see the pink indentations in the sides of his nose. “I remember primarily that it was very gay. It’s a very gay book. He tries to convince you that it’s not, but it is. Well, my French teacher tried to convince us that it wasn’t, anyway. I think Proust himself was less conflicted about it.”

“They did invent fellatio,” Bond said.

“That can’t possibly be true. Even in school I thought that was ridiculous—I believe no one wrote it _down_ until the French came along, but people must have come up with it independently.”

“You’re just jealous.”

“That I didn’t invent the blowjob?”

“Very jealous.”

“Not in the least. We live in the economy of sampling—of, of remix culture. Who cares about inventing it? I _perfected_ the blowjob.” 

They had wound up very close together. He could smell the tea on Q’s breath, the wool of his jumper, the coconut of his shampoo. There was a crumb of chocolate balanced delicately on the button of his collar.

“Prove it,” Bond said.

A smile moved over Q’s mouth, as restless and inexorable as a wave. He licked his lips.

But then, somehow, the moment was gone, or else had flattened out. There was almost a popping sound as air and space came back between the two of them, along with the mundane understanding that Moneypenny would knock again any minute now and that Addy was off somewhere laying out two painkillers beside a glass of water. And Q’s wedding band was still on his left hand. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time.

Q turned his back to Bond and started moving a plastic tray in and out of one of the biscuit sleeves. Bond gave serious thought to cyanide capsules.

Then Q said, “I’d have gotten down on my knees for you right next to my desk the night you came back for that _fucking_ car, and you know it. And you _knew_ it.”

“No,” Bond said. “If you want to think I’ve been a bastard, go ahead, but not because of that. We danced around it. You could have said yes whenever you liked.”

“You weren’t asking.”

“Did I have to? You’re supposed to be the clever one.”

“I thought I was going to have more time,” Q said tightly. “I didn’t know you were going to go off with someone else.”

_I could say the same_ , Bond almost said, but he was able at last to keep his mouth shut. That was his “clove,” what he could never afford to give up: that he was jealous of a dead man. “It was easier to decide we’d been amiable than it was to think I had to choose. And she was—escape. That was very pretty.”

“ _She_ was very pretty. And likely still is.”

“Yes,” Bond said, “but so are you. Although I prefer your hair longer.”

Q gave a very horsey and undignified snort. “I can grow it back out.”

“That would get my vote.” He was conscious of the sounds outside the door—listening for footsteps was and always would be second nature to him. “Why didn’t we move forward back then, Q?”

Q shrugged, one-shouldered. “I romanticized the waiting, I suppose—it was easier, when you were going to come with certain attendant difficulties. Mostly cowardice, though—and you weren’t any better. Throw yourself in front of gunfire but somehow balk at a simple ‘date me.’ I congratulate you on growing much more forward in your time abroad. Shyness is unbecoming in a man who, if I remember right, once had it off with an assassin’s widow against a wall.”

“You were more difficult than any assassin’s widow. I knew you.”

“For most people, that wouldn’t be much of an obstacle.”

“You haven’t mistaken me for most people, have you, Q?”

Then he heard her footsteps, and he knew that Q did too. Q smiled wryly. “Point,” he said, and he picked Bond’s hand up off the counter, considered it in front of his mouth for just a moment—and then took the biscuit out from between his fingers. “Neither of can afford to make that mistake.”

Moneypenny had her own key, which made Bond consider how much time she must have spent in Q’s flat in the aftermath of Nick. Bond had done his share of sitting at bedsides, as improbable as it seemed, if only because they were all considered suicide risks at the drop of a hat. After M’s husband had died, he had turned up ‘round her house at odd hours with whiskey, tea, and excuses; that was how he had met Eve, actually. She had been coming out when he had been going in. He had felt the oddest flash of jealousy then: that she should have been there when he was not.

He felt the same way now, as he watched Q bump his mouth casually against her cheek. She handed him a bottle and he groaned.

She ignored him and looked over his shoulder to Bond. “Hello,” she said. There was a note of caution in her voice, as if he were going to pick a fight with her.

Bond slid his elbows off Q’s counter. The movement pulled a little at the scar on his chest, and he suddenly felt at home with her in a way he had with no one else since he’d returned, because, after all, he had been thinking of her for years, on damp mornings and in bad weather, in hotel fitness centers across the globe. He had grown into thinking of the shot with a kind of perverse fondness, as if he’d been broken and she had signed his cast. He didn’t see any kind of point in being angry with her.

He brought over glasses and the wariness left her face. She smiled him.

“Good,” she said. “I have about a month left to blow a whole night on drinking until I can’t feel my hands and feet any longer, and I suggest we take advantage of it.”

“With _this_ it’s not going to take very long,” Q said, still looking dubiously at the bottle.

“You’re such a snob.”

“Because I don’t want to go blind from this _lamp oil_ you dig up?”

Bond poured. In deference to Q’s sensibilities, he gave him a few fingers less.

“No, all of it,” Q said, with tremendous resignation in his voice, “I might as well _enjoy_ it.”

“You’re the least in need of it,” Eve said.

“None of us are free from moral ambiguity. If it makes you feel better, I’ll stand with my face half in shadow to seem more despairing.” He tossed back his drink and shuddered. “I was trying to remember what I threw at you the night of Nick’s wake.”

“I take it back,” she said. “No need for dramatics—you’ve earned your cheap liquor as much as the rest of us.”

“No, I mean it. I was trying to remember.”

“A basket,” Eve said. “It was one of those little baskets you keep keys in.”

“That’s milder than I thought.”

“Wouldn’t have even scratched me. Also you’re rubbish at throwing at things, and you couldn’t see for crying.”

“Ah,” Q said. He let Bond pour him another drink. “That must have been embarrassing.”

“Not half so much as not reacting at all,” Bond said. He put his hand on Q’s arm and felt the lumpy weave of his jumper and underneath, the hot, live-wire solidity of Q himself. He saw Eve’s gaze stray to his hand and fix itself there, curious but not quite suspicious. “Then you’d wonder about yourself.”

“Speaking from personal experience?” Q said tartly.

“My parents.”

“Don’t use your dead parents to win arguments,” Eve said. “It’s unbecoming.”

“So sorry.”

She raised her eyebrows at his hand and he raised them back, which must have answered her, because she nodded crisply—or as crisply as the already-taking-effect alcohol would allow. “Glaspell’s going to be fine. You’ve got a steady hand, and you’re aware of limitations. And she’ll bounce back. They have greater elasticity at that age, psychologically, than we do now—I remember walking around for a few days like I’d been poleaxed, and weeping at odd intervals, but I also ran my best time on the course and sweated out my fear in the sauna. She knew what she was signing up for.”

“To the point of already having done it, if I recall,” Q said.

“There’s a world’s worth of difference between a four and a nine,” Eve said, dismissing Q’s point. “She wasn’t ready then, and her instructor knew it. She was this time—that’s a credit to you, by the way, Bond, even if it doesn’t feel like it.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Well, I tried,” she said, and tilted back the neck of the bottle itself.

“Not especially hard,” Q said.

“We have a long life ahead of us if we’re lucky,” Eve said. Her mouth was shiny with whiskey and as she moved to kick off her heels, it occurred to Bond that her agents were all going to fall in love with her. “There’s no point trying hard for everything.”


End file.
